Bullfrog Stripers

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Well, just wrapped up a week on the lake and getting ready to head home tomorrow. Thought I'd share with you all our report. We had a very successful week boating lot's and lot's of stripers.

Most trips to powell, I will spend a day and run up lake to GHB or down lake to the rincon etc. This week I only left bull frog bay once and then didn't go any further than moki. Why? Because we were to busy catching fish!

1st, I asked some info on umbrella rigs on a different thread and we gave them a shot. We fished a captain mack's. I had a couple that had 5 lures so we cut the hooks off from 2 of them and successfully had a 3 hook legal rig. We trolled them with other cranks (mostly a thunderstick) and the umbrellas would get hit probably 5 or 6 times to every 1 of the cranks.

We primarily fished the back of the bay from dome rock on back. We would troll until we found a school or until we hooked up. Many times after hooking up we'd drop spoons on them once they followed to the boat. We repeated this on and off all week. Still tons of shad back there, as we passed ball after ball on the graph.

A couple of the days we filled our coolers by noon and got off the lake and took the kids on a hike. Overall we came home with between 40 - 70 stripers each day! That's a lot of filleting, and vacuum sealing! Almost all fish were very healthy and fat. I think we only had 2 skinny ones on the first day that we dispatched.

Oh, and with the water receding so quickly it really started to expose the mussels in the area. Didn't take them long to make an impact in the north lake.

Moderator

Great report. Thank you. I have not used U-rigs lately and this is s good reminder that in the right circumstances they are perhaps the best lures to use. I think the key statement is that "Shad were everywhere". In that instance it is hard to find a better lure.

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Please tell me a little more about your umbrella rig. What lures did you use on it? What speed did you troll it? How deep did you troll it? Did you ever get more than one fish at a time? Any tricks to keeping it from becoming a tangled mess everytime you brought in a fish?

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Please tell me a little more about your umbrella rig. What lures did you use on it? What speed did you troll it? How deep did you troll it? Did you ever get more than one fish at a time? Any tricks to keeping it from becoming a tangled mess everytime you brought in a fish?

The swimbait one was more productive. These rigs come with a depth chart that you can adjust your line length to achieve different results. Most of the striper schools we graphed were in the 30-40 depth so we fished them around 20'. We have the rigs with 5 lures. But to be legal, we cut off the hook (left the swimbait and jig head to keep it balanced) on two of them. We did lose a number of fish that we saw would hit the rig and obviously one without a hook. I consistently trolled about 3.5 I did see some guys trolling some cranks much slower and had a lot of success as well. Getting double fish was way more common than I expected. Probably 1 in every 5 hook ups had a double on. I never had any major problems with tangling. Definitely not from bringing in a fish. Mostly with my kids trying to get it back in the water after unhooking, but even with that said, my kids are 8, 10, and 12 and they did most of the getting them in and out of the water and we had few issues. Most adults should fair even better. We had them tied up to 30 lb test braid. I'd maybe even consider going 40 lb, but I wasn't willing to buy more line and re-rig the rods for it. We had them on trolling rods with a depth counter reel, which worked real well to determine the right depth. Most the times after getting one in the boat we'd end up with a school under us and would drop spoons with mixed results. Some times they would eat them up and others it would be rather difficult to get any additional in the boat. After a while we simply went back to trolling if we didn't get a hit on spoons within a few minutes of them under the boat, even if they were still there as it often was pointless unless they were in the right mood.

Question for you Wayne. Is there any consideration for a Powell only regulation allowing more hooks on umbrella rigs? It seems that if the goal is to harvest as many stripers as possible out of the lake that that would be more effective. We probably would have brought in a dozen - two dozen more fish had we had all 5 hooks in use.